I joined DIHI in search of real-world experience handling electronic medical record healthcare datasets and improving my data science and programming skills.

Kristin Corey, my fellow medical student classmate, and I were the two lead data scientists and innovation scholars on the PROMISE project. We created the data repository called Pythia of over 150,000 surgical patients and their post-surgical outcomes. Then, we worked with a PhD statistician to create predictive models for post-surgical complications. Finally, I created a web applet that could be used as a calculator to predict post-surgical complications from 19 patient pre-surgical variables. My coding in SQL, R and python, analysis and documenting practices improved significantly as a result of working on the project and within our interdisciplinary team.

Ultimately, we presented Pythia as a surgical data resource to surgical department leadership, including Dr. Allan Kirk, under whom we have been working on applications of Pythia for outcomes and quality improvement projects. These experiences have completed a loop between ideation, research and implementation and have taught me how this cycle works in a learning healthcare system.

Throughout my fellowship, I was living in India. Despite this, DIHI allowed me to work on projects remotely and part-time. The flexibility was only one way in which I felt empowered by DIHI—Mark, Suresh, and others continually shared resources, advice and mentorship that helped me learn quickly. I would recommend the fellowship to anyone who wants an intimate understanding of how to scale innovation in a learning health system or strengthen their technical skills.